CADRE Comments

PART 8: LIKE ONE UNTIMELY BORN Starting from back here , I've been arguing that Mark (the GosMark author) didn't invent the tomb of Jesus Christ or even the emptiness of the tomb: the hypothesis doesn't fit the actual facts of the textual characteristics, and the implications of those textual characteristics, and so I would regard that theory as historically impossible (even though not metaphysically impossible) even if I was an atheist. But as tomb sceptics are well aware, the only earliest texts that mention a tomb are the four canonical Gospels -- and Acts, which people are sometimes less aware of, since the tomb and its emptiness are only mentioned by heavy implication once (in Simon Peter's first sermon) and only mentioned once explicitly in the first main report of a sermon from Paul of Tarsus. Some sceptics, not only Jesus Myth proponents (though naturally them, too), like to appeal to an argument from silence in the epistles (and RevJohn) about the tomb, ...

PART 5: OBLIVION-GUSHING DOES NOT HELP We've been doing this a while, starting back here at Part 1. Currently I'm looking at a number of problems that tend to cluster around the Gospel tomb accounts, and how their existence as problems doesn't follow cleanly from the proposal that GosMark's author simply invented the tomb (or even its emptiness). In the previous Part, that problem was women being the first witnesses to the tomb, in the sense of them being women at all. But there are more subtle problems associated with those women: 4.) GosMark's invention of the tomb, and so of the women being at the tomb (or even his invention of the women, too), does not fit the embarrassing GosLuke material of the apostles deriding the women's report as "oblivion-gush". Peter is a partial exception in GosLuke; but the brief verse about him rushing out to check the tomb is late (and meant to clarify something in the Emmaus story itself about people, plural...

Introductory note from Jason Pratt: see here for the previous entry; and see here for the first entry of the series. (It explains what I'm doing, and how, and contains the Johannine prologue.) An earlier guest author for the Cadre, Anne A. Kim, aka "Weekend Fisher", has also compiled a slightly different, and slightly more traditional {g}, way of solving for the Resurrection ranges, so to speak, here. Seeing as I certainly didn't need to do a harmonization study on Acts per se, except insofar as it relates to the end of the Gospel accounts (including Luke's), yet at the same time I had to find a way to ease out of telling the story, I have chosen to skip past a couple of things in early chapters of Acts. This includes reference to Judas' fate; though this can be accounted for easily enough if Peter and/or Luke is focusing on the nastiness of the result of a rope or branch snapping and Judas' body falling to the ground to be burst open. (By the legalities...